False equivalence. A license and seat belt do not perform survaillence and report to a 3rd party.
Additionally, sarcastic comments are rarely informative, since their primary purpose is to be demeaning. Please provide actual, clear argument next time.
Your phone and your government already do though and last time I checked nobody cared. It's just posturing, we're already way to deep to escape these things
Huh? What is your point? Are you saying we should do nothing at all to fight for our privacy whenever and wherever we can because “smartphones”? Seems like a silly argument to me.
I'm curious how this would be implemented to only detect alcohol impairment, wouldn't it be technically easier to check for impairment of any kind, including drowsiness?
And I am really interested how they would sort through false positives of a passenger being drunk but the designated driver is not, someone having open alcohol in the car, using alcohols to sanitize etc.
If you buy a top-model Subaru it comes with driver-facing cameras that detect drowsiness and advise you to pull over. The tech is already here and in cars.
You literally can't avoid it. When it comes to cars, they're already collecting data and sending it to the vendors; it's still a field in development, but it's improving fastly - both in terms of sending and of using the data.
I know that a lot of people will find this to be a little dystopian.
To me, as long as it’s done in a way that’s reliably accurate with no false positives, unobtrusive to use, and doesn’t phone the police or write a guilty-until-proven-innocent-ticket, I think it’s a great idea.
Alcohol-impaired crashes are responsible for 30% of all traffic fatalities. [1] That’s huge.
Way too many people casually drive drunk or buzzed.
In a rural area, you had a few beers, you're at 0.07, and your wife has a stroke. The speed limit through nowhere is 50 and on the way you plateau at 0.09. If only the speed governor or alcohol monitor understood...
Or, maybe a tornado or disaster occurs and you need to evacuate.
Or, maybe you're moving your own car within your own driveway.
No thanks!
Rather than automated enforcement, we should teach why things are important.
I'm not going to come out one way or another with a declaration of exactly where the line should be drawn (keeping in mind that in my younger years, I didn't even agree with seatbelt mandates), but this sort of tradeoff occurs with any rules at all. They inevitably cause at least some harm, but if the good outweighs the harm by a large enough measure, we adopt the rule anyway. Having speed limits and traffic signals at all is an obvious example. Somebody somewhere has died at least once because they weren't in an ambulance and their driver couldn't get to the hospital fast enough. You're effectively making the Jack Bauer argument. What if a nuke is about to go off and you're absolutely certain the guy you have knows where it is and how you can stop it? Rather than blanket bans on torture, we should teach interrogators how to have good judgement. I suspect you would not accept the exact same argument in that case.
1. The disabling threshold could be set well above "buzzed" or "the legal limit" if that makes you feel better. Or, instead of being disabled, the car could be speed governed, hazard lights forced on, or something of that nature. Heck, if you want to teach us why things are important, implement the system without any disabling functionality and notify the driver that they're over the limit (a lot of buzzed drivers don't even know they've done something wrong in the first place).
2. Implementing a system to disable restrictions during major emergency events would be trivially complicated and inexpensive. We already have a national emergency alert system that pushes out to every cellular connection. Newly built cars very often have integrated cellular capabilities and always have some kind of software-based infotainment system.
3. It's not legal to drive drunk even on private property in a number of states, and being on private property doesn't make it any better of an idea even when it is technically legal.
4. Medical emergencies like the one you describe are more of a straw man argument than a concern with a lot of relevance to this topic. I could construct a similar argument: what if you live alone and have a medical emergency that prevents you from driving? The problem here is that rural areas have less access to fast emergency medical care in the first place, and that's just part of living in a rural area.
5. Rural areas have worse crash fatality statistics in the first place, so this system theoretically helps rural areas even more than urban ones. [1]
6. Let's say even after all this you still don't want it to be mandatory: the system could be offered as an insurance discount incentive and a lot of people would go for it.
I think you meant to type this instead of what you actually typed:
In a rural area, you had a few beers, you're at 0.07, and your wife has a stroke. The speed limit through nowhere is 50 and on the way you plateau at 0.09. You hit my best friend Zain as he is walking home from my house after playing Street Fighter II: Champion Edition on my SNES in the early spring of 1994 and making plans for his 14th birthday. Because, I mean, c'mon it's only 0.09 and the restaurant lobby has bribed the US government into believing that 0.08 is safe even though every single other civilized country ON THE ENTIRE FUCKING PLANET has set the limit at 0.03 or below and it's not like you can't bake a cake without breaking a few Zains, right? Besides you drive better when you're buzzed EVERYONE knows this who cares what a voluminous body of scientific literature says because fuck you you aren't gonna tell me what to do with my life and I don't give a fuck if Zain dies just because of some bullshit fantasy scenario I made up because I'm the only person who matters in this story, bud you and your friends are just pieces of shit and I don't care if every time you look in the mirror and you see your greying sideburns and wrinkled belly you think about how you're an old man now and your best friend never made it to 14 because 0.08 is safe and nothing you can say can change my mind because YOU'RE A FASCIST and anyone who criticizes my bullshit scenarios with the actual truth can go to hell. Now I'm going to deflect any criticism of drunk driving with "whaddabow tired driving huh, huh, huh?" because not only am I a selfish asshole, I am also such a sniveling little turd that I think that is an appropriate response, so there. I mean what if Jason Bourne himself pulls me over on the side of that dark country road and says "UNLESS YOU CAN DRIVE ME TO THE WHITE HOUSE RIGHT NOW A NUKE WILL EXPLODE" and you've had a couple of glasses of champagne? WTF that scenario is as totally 100% believable as all of the other bullshit I come up with. Try harder next time, Mr. 1984!
Here's what I know is important: not drinking and driving. How did I come to believe that was important? Maybe because it takes almost zero effort to discover that over 10,000 people die every year because the people who stole their lives justified drinking and driving.
There is zero justification. ZERO. If you're under the influence, you don't get to be the person who drives your wife to the hospital in an emergency. You don't get to escape tornados. You don't get to move cars in your driveway. If you want to have the freedom to do those things at any moment, don't drink alcohol.
Frankly, that last "maybe" of yours has me seething. It's not exactly fair to you, because I have to assume you've not lost someone in that way. But I have, and many other have as well, and you expressed an interest in learning important things, so let's learn from this story:
When I was a teen, my best friend was killed by his dad moving a car out of their garage. It was a Saturday afternoon, and his dad and his dad's buddies, had been working on a car in the garage, and drinking beers. After finishing work on the car, they decided to begin work on another car. To do so, they needed to back the first car out of the garage, then pull the other one in. Something that sounds very similar to "moving your own car within your own driveway."
The problem is, my friend's dad neglected to look in his mirrors or over his shoulder as he went to move the car. He backed it up, then hit something. Because he had been drinking though, his reaction times weren't great. Rather than stopping when hitting something, he continued to roll another fifteen feet down the driveway, which is when he discovered that he'd hit, then flattened and smeared my friend, his son, down the driveway before he even noticed. It was a closed casket funeral, and the dad wasn't allowed to attend. He was in jail, awaiting a trial. It wasn't a slam dunk case though. He had a blood alcohol level of 0.075, under the legal limit for his state. The jury decided that the influence of the alcohol, though under the legal limit, was enough that it impaired his ability to operate a vehicle, and found him guilty, after which he was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
My friend's dad decided that because it was his car in his driveway, drinking and driving was justified. It wasn't. He lost his son and his freedom. I watched someone who I'd known since I was an infant, someone who was closer to me than my own brothers, get run over and destroyed as I stood there, yelling for his dad to stop.
There's zero justification for drinking and driving.
It is a little dystopian. On the other hand, clearly the various legal and ethical reasons to not drink and drive aren't helping as much as they could.
My understanding, though, is that driver training in the US is a joke compared to other countries. Aside from a lower age requirement, it is incredibly easy to get a learner's permit and driver's license here, so much so that the latter is the primary form of ID for almost everyone.
Per the NHTSA[0],
> In 2020, 29% of young drivers 15 to 20 years old who were killed in crashes had BACs of .01 g/dL or higher.
So teenagers are driving earlier than other countries, but then, our alcohol culture is also pretty weird. There is an expectation of teetotaling until you hit 21. In practice, this means teenagers are sneaking out, frequently by car, to drink. [1]
But then you have to ask, why are teenagers sneaking out by car? Well, that's because with only a handful of very dense, urban exceptions, there is no infrastructure to get around any other way. When an American says small town, what they mean is, "a town with a small population that is suprisingly large on the map". And when they say city, what they mean is, "a town with a larger population that is still surprisingly large on the map". These places don't have buses or bike trails or even sidewalks.
The whole thing is a mess of unintended consequences from top to bottom. If we had better travel options, kids wouldn't need cars to sneak around. If we had a less puritanical alcohol culture, the kids wouldn't need to sneak around at all. If we didn't have rely on cars so extensively, we could raise driving age and driver test requirements to make the roads safer all around.
Maybe instead of looking for the technological easy way out we ought to 1) promote safer forms of travel than every-man-for-himself multi-ton death machines, 2) treat them like the multi-ton death machines they are instead of handing out licenses like candy, and 3) embrace reality to give kids safe outlets to do what they're going to do anyway instead of burying our heads in the sand and pretending our precious little babies would never do anything bad.
Some great points here. I live in the U.S. (Tennessee) and in this state new drivers aren’t even required to do a driving exam, just a multiple choice exam. The roads are an absolute mess as a result, I’m constantly nearly getting hit by other drivers
For the license or the learner's permit? Where I'm from (Alabama), the learner's permit is just a multiple choice exam, but the license itself still requires a driving test. Not a hard one, but at least it's there.
Are you sure it's a fantasy? We have all kinds of similar tests with acceptable accuracy and precision.
Like, why are you jumping to the conclusion that engineers somewhere can't implement that? Seems to me that's like saying it'll never be possible to make a phone call without a phone line.
I support the idea, I only worry that there’s no way the manufacturers won’t record and transmit this information, to both themselves and ad/tracking companies.
I remember after market versions of this in the 90s. To start the car, you had to blow. No communication and nothing more complicated than it. It seems crazy to me that we still haven't required this. We also should have lowered the legal blood alcohol limit ages ago!
I also think we should require governors to limit acceleration and top speed. Since cars have had GPS for 15+ years, this could be dynamic, so no doing 55mph down at 20mph residential street!
I suppose, by the time we actually implement this, it'll be moot, as we are getting closer and closer to automated cars.
In the linked press-release, they call equally for "intelligent speed adaptation systems", which I think would annoy a much wider proportion of the country than alcohol detection.
I remember decades ago being amazed that Japan's commercial trucks had lights on the outside of the cabs that showed how fast they were going to aid speeding enforcement. A signal of wrong-doing, rather than a lock on wrong doing. Maybe that's the trick to adoption.
We already live in a tyrannical "Utopia" - this particular stomping of rights is actually a scene in this short film, which was a joke when it was filmed just a few years ago - BTW, it's worth spending a few minutes to watch the whole thing...
It depends on the state. There are several in which having an open container is not illegal. Passengers can drink in some. And it seems the driver can even drink in Mississippi.
There's no state law against drinking while driving in Mississippi, but many many municipalities have open container laws, and there are still some dry counties.
